Email Marketing – The Importance of Permission

For a company, sending out a mass email or newsletter is an extremely useful marketing tool. Not only does it provide your customers with free, useful information it is also a great way of keeping in touch with existing clients.

Newsletters can include information on your services, products and any events that are upcoming. And by sending regular newsletters, be them monthly or quarterly you are likely to establish a stronger working relationship with your clients.

By placing a newsletter on your website, not only are you generating traffic you are also giving clients the opportunity to sign up for more. This is a great way of gathering new email addresses for future newsletters of potential clients.

However, if you have a list of potential ‘target’ clients the sign-up process is going to take a little bit of extra work!

If your list of email contacts is extensive, a great way to circulate professional and bespoke newsletters is to use sites such as MailChimp. This is the world’s leading email marketing platform, and not only does it make designing and creating newsletters easy, it also ensures they’ll never go to the wrong person.

The importance of Permission

Prior to sending any newsletter, it is imperative you remove any email addresses of people who have not expressly asked to be on your list.

The key to a successful newsletter campaign is ensuring you have the permission from all of your subscribers that they want to receive it!

To ensure you have received written permission from every subscriber, and avoid being blacklisted or mistaken as spam, MailChimp have created double opt-in forms which take care of this for you.

Double Opt In.

This is a two-step process, which you can design and send to new subscribers prior to them receiving any newsletter.

Step 1 – a new subscriber fills out your online signup form.  This is their first contact with your brand, so keep in line with your branding. Set up a welcome email introducing your company, and even consider an incentive such as prize draw or special offer to new subscribers.

Step 2 – they click a confirmation link in a follow-up email allowing permission for them to added to your MailChimp list. This contains a unique URL, which a new subscriber has to click to be added to your list. Again, MailChimp allows you to design this stage in keeping with your company brand and style.

The benefit of Double Opt-In is that it adds a layer of confirmation to the sign-up process, ensuring your list isn’t clogged up with bad addresses containing typos or invalid emails.

This double confirmation should also reduce the number of complaints from subscribers who may forget they’ve agreed to signing up.

By adding this additional layer to the permission process, MailChimp guarantees your newsletters will only reach confirmed subscribers resulting in more successful campaigns.

Archived records of subscriber’s consent are also stored on MailChimp.

If you require any support with marketing strategies and activities, we’d love to help.

Contact the office on: 0114 4070159, office@scala.uk.com.